circle like piranhas. To Ailsa he’d been all politeness and legal restraint, but as I passed, I heard him hiss to whomever it was he was talking to, ‘I’m fighting the fuckers off,’ and I was quietly impressed. Ailsa’s decision to stick with him is mainly financial – his offices are behind a grimly anonymous shopfront in Clapham Junction, and he’s priced accordingly – but I like knowing he has something to prove.
This morning, he led us through a modern glass door into a tall red-brick building, and up a flight of stairs carpeted in royal blue, to the first floor. We waited in a grey antechamber, a bit like a dentist’s waiting room only with worse magazines (New Law Journal), until a tall, lean man with a hooked nose and thinning hair walked into the doorway and stood there, as if striking a pose. Robert Grainger QC, I assumed: the man described by Standling as ‘my first choice for murder’.
Ailsa had met him once, and he greeted her with an air of restrained professional courtesy, like a head teacher meeting a parent who’s come in with a complaint. He shook Standling’s hand, then he turned to me and said baldly: ‘And you are?’
‘This is Verity Baxter, the neighbour with whom Mrs Tilson is residing.’
Grainger looked at me carefully. ‘You’re not a witness?’
‘No. I gave a statement to the police, but it wasn’t very helpful.’
I found my hand reaching for the back of my head, patting down the hair there. I washed it this morning before setting off, but the water was cold and my head was sticky with soap. I adjusted my glasses, squeezing the little bundle of Sellotape that secured the arms at each side. I put my hand out, but as he didn’t proffer his, I made to put it in my pocket, though it was too full.
His eyes narrowed. ‘So, just to be sure: you’re not the neighbour who has given evidence for the prosecution?’
Standling took a small step forwards, knocking his shin on the low magazine table. ‘That’s the other side. Mr Andrew Dawson. Verity is a friend of the family, but she was out on the evening in question.’
‘Pub quiz,’ I said. ‘Every Wednesday.’
He nodded. ‘OK. I need to check, you do understand. It wouldn’t do for myself, or Mrs Tilson, to be having any contact with a material witness.’
‘I’m an immaterial witness,’ I said. It was a stab at a joke, and it covered my unhappiness that I wasn’t a witness. ‘I didn’t know Tom was in the country. He was supposed to be away.’
‘Right, OK.’ He cut me off. ‘Well if you’re all right waiting here, Mrs Tilson will be out in a while.’
The three of them left the antechamber and through the open doorway, I saw them enter a room opposite. The door closed decisively, but I could still hear Grainger’s voice now and then, a general burr and the occasional ejaculation. ‘That’s very important’ and ‘I’d like to be clear’, and something that sounded like ‘good God’. In court, it’s obviously an advantage to have a voice that travels. But he seemed to do an awful lot of talking for someone who was in this instance being paid to listen.
I sat alone on a black leather chair, nursing the bottle of water I’d brought with me. On the ledge outside the window, an enormous white seagull perched apparently motionless. The room smelt of stale chicory. I recognised the particular reek from the coffee machine at the council; the drop that fell from the black plastic funnelled neck onto the hotplate if you took the jug away too soon, the hiss and ensuing stench of it. In the doorway, a woman in a black gown was talking to a young man with a neat beard about a Netflix true-crime drama. He caught my eye and said: ‘Can I get you anything? No? OK,’ adding, ‘Your sister won’t be long.’
My sister. I thought for a moment about times when I had waited for Faith: in the street outside her first job interview aged sixteen at the local hairdresser (I combed out her hair before she went in); on a chair at the bank while she opened her starter account; in the foyer at the centre during her driving theory test. I hadn’t realised at the time, but I was her enabler. Each wait was a step towards her escape.
‘Ailsa’s not my sister,’ I said, but he’d gone.
About forty minutes later, the door